It’s no secret that competitive intelligence has become widely recognized and accepted. In fact, for most businesses and websites, competitive intelligence has become paramount. It is necessary for businesses to advance their rank, based on what the competition is being noticed for.
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive Intelligence is summed up by the actions of defining, gathering information, analyzing, and using your competitive online environment to get a leg up in search engine optimization. As a general idea, it sets a good foundation for the business goals you are trying to reach.
Let’s say you are a business owner in the realty field. You may notice that your competition is getting noticed for ‘in-home DIY’ type blog posts. Knowing that traffic is being shifted to them, because of articles like that, gives you the upper hand. Once you have that information, you too can start producing the articles necessary for traffic development.
While staying current with trends is important, it is equally important to try and predict what may be on the uprise. A big way to identify and predict trends is through, you guessed it, social media. If you don’t consider yourself social media guru, there are tools to help you predict shifts in topics on the uprise.
Does Competitive Intelligence Help My Business?
Naturally, by now, you should be slowly becoming more open to the idea of competitive intelligence and how it affects your business as a whole. Here are some of the biggest reasons competitive intelligence should become your new best friend.
- Knowing your competitors next move. Competition is everything when it involves a make-or-break situation with your business. Eventually, knowing your competitors next move can help you stay ahead of the game and relevant.
- Making better decisions for your business. Your business is like your child. You want it to grow and thrive. In order to do so, you have to make strong, effective decisions for its well-being. In some cases, you may even need to redirect your business, if you’re not directed toward your target niche.
- Pinpointing gaps in your market. Businesses are constantly growing and changing. Identifying gaps in your market can actually help you rank better. Once you identify the gaps, you can make it your responsibility to fill them. If there are gaps, there usually aren’t a whole lot of pages or posts regarding the topic. If you create a blog post where the topic is lacking, you have a better chance of gaining rank. More people will click to your website, based on the fact that you are one of the few sites covering it.
- Getting ahead of the game. This is actually a pretty general statement. Knowing your competition gives you a chance to know what they are being noticed for. Knowing what they are being noticed for lets you produce relevant content. Producing relevant content gets you traffic.Traffic helps with your rank on search engines.
- Influences on your niche market. Last, and certainly not least, competitive intelligence helps you to find influences on your niche market. How other companies are performing, influencing trends, etc., also helps you to create similar influence through your website(s).
Competitive intelligence is a good reminder that you are not alone in your SEO journey. Several people are trying to accomplish the same goals that you. Reaching the top of a search engine results page can feel like a struggle sometimes. Do not forget your main goal, and definitely consider taking SEO training workshops, any tips, or advice given to you by professionals.
Steve Scott is the CEO & Director of Training at the New York SEO Training Academy. He has taught SEO skills to people from around the world and currently offers his hands-on search engine optimization training workshops in New York to individuals and businesses of all sizes. Corporate SEO training classes and consulting are also available.
